Hospital half-life

Recent trouble in the family brought home to me the incredible skill, and no doubt ruthlessness, of those memoirists and autobiographers who manage to fashion a story out of their own lives. Two years ago I was an ordinary lowly journalist to whom nothing newsworthy happened. Then two dear family members entered upon long-term health crises and our lives were all upended. The first crisis was Alzheimer's disease, a slow-burning, evil, anti-human work of destruction. Home life, personal horizons, social habits, all changed dramatically. The second, later crisis was more immediately disastrous, a road accident that caused severe brain damage. My brother and I fell straight out of our native time and space into a vortex of hospital and ICU, cash stress and weird friends and relatives, in a strange city.

I don't mean to say that these experiences are unique, nor even these tragedies. Such things happen to many people. As someone who writes and edits for a living, however, I thought I had the basic tools to capture such times, in words - merely capture, I say, not present literarily. But, of course, real life doesn't follow a storyline. And in these stories where would one place The End?

I could tell you about finally learning how my surname should be pronounced by a Marathi-speaker, when ICU security shouted the name to call us in. About how pleasing the view from the ICU - from my eye level, not that of the dear man lying in bed. About the multi-generational enjoyment being had at a busy nearby park where we waited between bedside visits. About the nurses, vibrant with energy and ambition. About Tushar mama, friendly physiotherapy aide and MJ-style dancer. About the serene lady whose corrupt husband's bills were being paid by the government department for which he had worked. About the elderly wife caring all alone for her inanimate husband, and watching over us, too, so that when we left we both touched her feet.

About how one soon learns to ignore other attendants, for who wants to hear someone else's sad story? About those few exceptions who, despite this, draw your attention and conversation. You realise that you never stop paying attention to the other patients - notably the ones with injuries like your own patient's - and out of the corner of your eye you watch how their families deal with them. The hospital utterly denies you self-pity, for they are all heroes.

Lesser heroes the doctors, from the Catholic nun who tells us with a twinkle in her eye that a bit of rum occasionally is OK for the patient (to the silent consternation of her lay fellows), to the kindhearted and lonely intern who takes us under her wing and compensates for the laziness and ignorance of our lead doctors. Also good for health: Arjun the gorgeous turkey in the hospital zoo, who has no success with the turkey hens but whose gobble I happily learn to imitate.

And so on. There are vignettes, and my brother can tell the anecdotes better, but to tell the whole requires something more than words - it requires, I now realise, that one has been deeply altered by the experience, and that one has the subtlety to know and say how. For this reason the attendant has the least to express, being a facilitator, waiter and worrier rather than a patient or doctor - neither the one whose existence hangs in the balance nor the one who must act, always at once, to tip the balance this way. One might say that such are the preconditions for any effective life story.

Which is why, I suppose, just about all writing of ill health is done by those who suffer and those who heal. There is a kind of wild and precipitous half-life in between that the long-term attendant has experienced but that cannot be written - it seems to me. If you know of any such, however, please write and tell me.

rraote@yahoo.com